Walker Percy subtitles this witty, philosophical miscellany The Last
Self-Help Book. The designation is ironic because Percy doubts that
"self can help itself or, with apologies to Socrates, even know itself.
The pith of his bad news goes something like this: scientific
observation explains the world wonderfully but cannot explain the
nature of the self without dispiriting results. The reason is that
science reduces the mysterious entity to chemical interactions and sets
of behavior. This does little for the...